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When to Quote Those Potty Mouths

THE Rev. Jesse Jackson last week made some unguarded comments about Senator Barack Obama that were picked up by a Fox News microphone he apparently thought was turned off. They included a reference to separating Obama from parts of his body he would just as soon keep.

The Times on Thursday devoted a column of type to the ensuing controversy and Jackson’s apology for what the newspaper called his “critical and crude” remarks, which included the bitter charge that Obama was “talking down to black people.” But it left readers completely in the dark about the crude part. The Washington Post was slightly less squeamish. It said Jackson suggested “that he wanted to castrate the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.”

For those curious about Jackson’s exact words — “I want to cut his nuts off” — The Post’s Web site provided a video link. The Times did not. (The Times agreed to an exception to its decision for this column because what he said is central to this discussion.) The New York Post, an in-your-face tabloid, put the single presumably offending word on its front page as a huge headline. The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times printed what Jackson said in full.

Steve Sanger, a reader from Bellingham, Wash., said he sometimes wonders if The Times is edited by “prudish kindergarten teachers.” He said: “It is not good when a NY Times reader is forced to wonder what actually the fuss is about and then must start looking at other newspapers to find out.”

Paul Winfield, news editor at The Times, said he and Chuck Strum, an associate managing editor, made the call to, effectively, bleep Jackson’s comments. Winfield said the remark about talking down to black people was what seemed newsworthy to him, while the vulgarity did not seem important enough to make an exception to stringent Times standards. Neither Bill Keller, the executive editor, nor Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, was consulted, and Abramson said they might have found an alternative way to deal with Jackson’s quote.

I would have just used it. Jackson is a major figure on the public stage. His comment, accompanied by a vigorous slashing motion, spoke to a deep anger toward Obama and a fascinating generational schism among black leaders. By failing to report what Jackson said, or even find a way to describe it more delicately, The Times left readers to wonder and speculate. Better to quote Jackson and move on.

But I’m sympathetic to Winfield and Strum, editors trying to maintain a civil New York Times in uncivil times.

As potty-mouth language spews from the president of the United States, the vice president of the United States, from rappers, rock bands, Hollywood movies, the Broadway stage, modern literature, cable television, the Internet and people on the sidewalk talking into their cellphones, The Times and other news media face a tough choice — just where to draw the line on words once thought unfit for what used to be called polite company.

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Clark HoytCredit
Chuck Kennedy/McClatchy-Tribune

The Times wants neither to be a holdout against modern culture nor at the forefront of defining new standards of what is acceptable. “We don’t want to cheapen ourselves,” said Craig Whitney, the standards editor of The Times. “But we don’t want to be so prissy we’re out of touch.”

Earlier last week, Burton Caine, a law professor at Temple University, wrote to protest what he saw as hypocrisy in the newspaper’s coverage of the death of George Carlin, the comedian who railed against censorship in such routines as “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” William Safire, for example, said last Sunday in his On Language column in the newspaper’s magazine that Carlin had performed “a perverse kind of linguistic service” by reducing the shock value of the seven words. Safire went nowhere near naming or describing those words. Caine said, “It is wrong to praise expression and refuse to print the words.”

But the newspaper’s Manual of Style and Usage says: “The Times virtually never prints obscene words, and it maintains a steep threshold for vulgar ones. In part the concern is for the newspaper’s welcome in classrooms and on breakfast tables in diverse communities nationwide. But a larger concern is for the newspaper’s character. The Times differentiates itself by taking a stand for civility in public discourse.”

The entry concludes: “In 1896, Adolph S. Ochs proclaimed that The New York Times would present the news ‘in language that is parliamentary in good society.’ Were Mr. Ochs alive today, he would still identify with The Times’s passion for its character. But he might simply write, ‘Keep it clean.’ ”

That is hard to do for a newspaper that wants to reflect the real world, and The Times does not always seem consistent in its decisions. It would not print “nuts” last week but put “cojones” in a headline 10 years ago. The newspaper reviewed a rock band last fall without printing its name because it contained what is probably the most objectionable of Carlin’s seven words. When Vice President Cheney used a variant of the same word on the floor of the Senate in 2004 to tell Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont what to do to himself, The Times again passed. But two years later, it did print another of Carlin’s words when President Bush told Tony Blair, then the British prime minister, what Syria needed to tell Hezbollah to knock off. The same word appeared last year in an article about a telephoned threat to Bernard Spitzer, whose son Eliot was then governor of New York. The Times was back on the conservative side this year, ignoring a vulgarism by former President Bill Clinton in the middle of a rant about Todd Purdum, a writer for Vanity Fair.

Keller told me before the Jackson issue arose: “I think the trend here — and it’s something I share — is we don’t want to be leading the charge to a coarser public discourse. We want to err on the side of civility. If occasionally that makes us seem squeamish or square, I can live with that.”

Caine, the law professor, argued that The Times needs to loosen up and cited as one model The New Yorker, where the barriers to Carlin’s forbidden words began falling in 1985.

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said, “People use these words in everyday speech. Why should we editors become so decorous and want to protect our readers from them? If a vice president uses a profanity to describe a senator, why should we sanitize his expression?”

Allan Siegal, Whitney’s predecessor as standards editor, said that Remnick was invited to speak at a retreat of Times editors some years ago and criticized “the prudery and hypocrisy of not using dirty words in the paper.” But while Remnick sees his audience and The Times’s as the same, The New Yorker is not delivered to middle- and high-school classrooms as 40,000 daily copies of The Times are.

The Times has built one of the most powerful brands in the world on the strength of writing “in a civil, measured way for people who want to read in a civil, measured way,” as Siegal put it. Although I would have quoted Jackson — and Cheney and Clinton, for that matter — I think the newspaper is wise to preserve its character and adapt slowly and carefully to the language around it. I use some of Carlin’s dirty words, but I do not want to read them in The Times unless it is essential, and I do not think I am alone.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on , on page WK12 of the New York edition with the headline: When to Quote Those Potty Mouths. Today's Paper|Subscribe